Consumers are more and more often recording family events, travel experiences and the like using digital video recording techniques. Today's advanced home video camera technologies allow huge amounts of such “home-grown” and other video data to be conveniently recorded and stored. For example, future generations of digital video recorders (DVRs) will provide storage capacities measured in terabytes. The more storage available, the more content the user will be likely to store. Services are also commonplace to convert older analog video formats such as film into more modern digital formats, increasing the quantity of digital video material even more. Commercial video editing products also allow for the creation of videos that greatly increase the quality and presentation of home movies.
Unfortunately, as easy as it is to record and edit family and other movies, archiving and retrieving them is not quite as simple. Unlike a stack of photos, a collection of home movies is not easily browsed. Finding a particular segment of content depends on identifying the specific item, which means that the item has to be categorized. For commercially produced movies and songs there are a number of services available today which provide detailed metadata (e.g. Internet Movie Database IMDb for movies, CDDB for music). But to be of real use for the management of large amounts of content, this metadata should stored in conjunction with the related content and presented to the user as one coherent item.
Recently, a number of standards such as MPEG-7 and TV-AnyTime have been developed which allow features of multimedia content to be described so that users can search for, browse and retrieve that content as efficiently and effectively as today's text-based search engines. These standards generally use a set of audio-visual metadata elements. Such so-called multimedia content management systems are already widely used in commercial contexts by content creators/owners and service providers/broadcasters. For example, in the case of DVD movies, metadata is often provided as part of the content itself so that users can access a specific part of a video through a “chapter selection” interface. Access to specific segments of the recorded program requires segmentation information concerning a program that describes a title, category, start position and duration of each segment, which is generated through a process called “video indexing”. To access a specific segment without the segmentation information of a program, viewers would have to linearly search through the program from the beginning, such as by using the fast forward button, which is a cumbersome and time-consuming process.
In another commercial context, third party service providers such as broadcasters may add metadata along with the associated content. For example, one such metadata source is an electronic program guide that is made available by some cable and satellite TV providers. EPG metadata includes a title, time of broadcast, and a brief description of the broadcasts.
Unlike commercially produced video, home movies generally contain little if any, metadata concerning their content which would allow them to be cataloged, searched and retrieved. Moreover, unlike the commercial context in which well defined metadata such as that available in an EPG can be used, consumers may often desire to index and retrieve movies in more idiosyncratic ways which do not lend themselves to the use of a limited number of descriptors. Even if consumers were to author metadata themselves, the process can be inconvenient and time-consuming.